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Small mistakes at Guantanamo have big consequences

KHARTOUM, April 3 (Reuters) - Clive Stafford Smith has spent years
helping detainees held at the U.S. prison at Guantanamo Bay cope with
what he calls severe physical and mental abuse.

But he still has trouble convincing some of them he is their lawyer, not another CIA agent trying to get into their heads.

In a book about to be published by Weidenfeld called "Bad Men", the
veteran death penalty lawyer recalls how many of his clients turned
paranoid in their small cells.

He says cooks, shopkeepers and television cameramen were tortured into admitting they worked for Osama bin Laden.

A Moroccan cook with bipolar disease, he said, was designated "the
general" by the U.S. military after he had a breakdown and announced he
was bin Laden's superior officer.

"Ahmed used to tell me 'I am
the cook that became a general and the crack of an egg became the
explosion of a bomb'," said Stafford Smith of his client Ahmed
al-Rachidi.

During a tour of Khartoum this week aimed at
mustering support for Sudanese detainees among the 380 held at
Guantanamo, Stafford Smith said he hoped his book would focus attention
on the 38 men he is defending at the U.S. naval base in Cuba.

He
doubts they will ever gain as much notoriety as Australian David Hicks,
the only prisoner convicted in the Guantanamo war crimes tribunals, who
could make about $1 million selling his memoirs, according to an
Australian publicist.

"I guarantee you we are going to get these prisoners home. It is just a
matter of how long it takes," he told Reuters in an interview in the
Sudanese capital.

IGUANA JUSTICE

The tall, sharp featured
47-year-old has devoted much of his life to fighting capital punishment
in the United States -- even in U.S. President George W. Bush's home
state of Texas -- and he has only lost a handful of cases.

But Guantanamo is a far more complicated challenge, defending people with few rights and an unclear legal status.

"We were arguing that if you gave the prisoners in Guantanamo Bay the
same rights as iguanas they would have legal rights," said the
British-born American.

"If you, as an an American soldier, kill
an iguana or harm an iguana you get a $10,000 fine and 10 years in
prison. But if you, as an American soldier, beat up on someone from
Sudan you get no punishment."

One of his best known cases is
Sudanese Sami al-Hajj, a former al-Jazeera cameraman who was picked up
in Pakistan in 2001 and is on his 85th day of a hunger strike. He
sleeps on a thin mattress over a metal bed. Hajj is allowed to read a
Koran, but without his glasses.

"At nine o'clock in the morning
they force feed him and he is strapped to a chair. They force a tube up
his nose. It is excruciatingly painful. That lasts about an hour," said
Stafford Smith.

"Three times so far, according to what Sami has
told me, they have put the tube in his lung ... and that is effectively
drowning him."

The routine is repeated at three o'clock in the afternoon.
Aside from alleged abuses, Guantanamo detainees are also vulnerable to
small misunderstandings that can have catastrophic consequences, said
Stafford Smith.

WHERE TOMATO MEANS MONEY

A translation
error fuelled suspicions Muhammad al-Gorani was an al Qaeda financier.
Stafford Smith says the word tomato was mistranslated into "money" due
to a difference in Arabic dialects.

"They got very aggressive
and said 'you have to have money' and Muhammad said he did not take any
tomatoes when leaving Saudi Arabia because he could get tomatoes
anywhere," he said.

"So they leapt to the conclusion that he is now an al Qaeda financier and that somehow he is in the money business."

Stafford Smith has many stories of torture, but it's the mental anguish
of Moroccan Ahmed al-Rachidi, the so-called general who lived in
Britain for 18 years, that has left one of the deepest emotional scars.

During a breakdown, Rachidi announced that he was bin Laden's superior
officer and that a huge snowball was about to envelope the earth and
kill mankind.

"They (the U.S. military) wrote the stuff down. They said he was the general of al Qaeda," Stafford Smith said.
"They agreed now that they got it wrong after five years and they
cleared him for release. It's one of the few instances that we proved
it's rubbish."

The cover of "Bad Men" has pictures of bin Laden,
Stafford Smith's clients in Guantanamo, Bush and his close ally British
Prime Minister Tony Blair.

"I put some of us lawyers on there just to be fair because they think we are the bad guys," said Stafford Smith. "Unfortunately George Bush is keeping me in business forever. But I wish he didn't."